It’s apt that Wagner and Verdi were born in the same year. They are romanticopera’s two great antipodes, united in stature, but divided in almost everything else. They embody two completely different outlooks on life and art, which are rooted in the cultures of their respective nations. That’s why every German city has a Wagnerstrasse, and every Italian one a Corso Giuseppe Verdi.

Though their supporters often did battle, thecomposers warily avoided each other. Verdi had a grudging respect for Wagner, but he warned younger Italian composers against following the Wagnerian path. Wagner wouldn’t even grant Verdi that much distinction, though there were more Italianate traits in him than he liked to admit.

Both cast a long shadow over opera during their lives and afterwards, and in Wagner’s case the shadow extended even further, to politics and the arts in general.

Two hundred years later, it’s easy to think the nationalist passions have cooled. But the recent rowover Daniel Barenboim’s decision to open La Scala’s season with Wagner instead of Verdi showed that they’re still there, just waiting to burst out.

And what about the wider world? Does one still have to be a Verdian or a Wagnerian, or have we learned how to love both? I asked some distinguished opera-lovers and practitioners to give their views.

I love them both – I don’t see why you’ve got to choose. I love the swiftness of Verdi, and the way immense psychological states are given such pure and frank musical statement. The lyric power, as in the fourth act of Sicilian Vespers, the grandeur of conception in Don Carlos, the bubbling exuberance in the party scenes in Traviata – it’s the variety and resourcefulness that makes him so great.

Wagner is massive, and pensive. The first and last acts of Parsifal are like watching a flower slowly open. The dramaturgy is only occasionally interesting, I think, but musically, there’s not much in sheer power and excitement to touch it. Every time I’ve ever seen Tristan, it has kept me awake for hours. Both of them are special, and work their magic through accumulation, and huge forms: both of them should be the objects of pilgrimage, not put on the iPod for casual moments here and there.

Rodney Milnes, former editor of Opera Magazine

I grew up at a time when the canon of acceptable taste was: German music good, Italian music bad, French music worse. So I was a fanatical Wagnerite, and could sing and play (with fistfuls of wrong notes) Acts I and III of Wagner’s Valkyrie almost by heart, and I assiduously attended countless Wagner performances.

My Damascene moment came in the 1960s, when after two Ring cycles at Covent Garden I heard Verdi’s Don Carlos at ENO and thought, well, Verdi says as much as Wagner about the impossibility of power and love, but in a quarter of the time and with real tunes. So I immersed myself with pleasure and instruction in all Verdi, while being disrespectful to Wagner in print. Now I’m more balanced: what Wagner did he did very well, and what Verdi did, ditto. Both were very great 19th-century composers.

Antonio Pappano, music director, Royal Opera

I’m very amused by the need to pit Verdi and Wagner in opposite camps ready to do birthday battle. What they share is much more interesting, a seriousness of purpose allied with a natural temperament for the theatre. They were born out of long traditions, and both pushed the boundaries of those traditions to probe, question and create a theatrical future.

Naturally Wagner is seen as the revolutionary in this regard, but Verdi’s slow-growing, organic development led to truly remarkable breakthroughs also. They shared a love of language, and declamation, in their hands, becomes the true communicator of the deepest human feelings. They both created unparalleled excitement in the theatre, and to that end used the orchestra to transmit gut-wrenching intensity.

Crucially, they both challenge performers in the extreme, a sure-fire guarantee that Richard and Giuseppe will be here for ever. Evviva!

Robert Jay QC, lead counsel to the Leveson Inquiry

Both Verdi and Wagner were philosophers, but in such different ways. Interestingly, in 1846 the Duchess of Parma wrote that “Verdi’s popularity will pass because he has much talent but precious little education, and a new genius may be born who will take music along a different, more scientific route.”

She was wrong in one sense but right in another. Wrong, because Verdi’s mature style became the embodiment of the very greatest in Italian opera: the expression of the most atavistic and intense passions through lyrical musical line. Right, because a new genius did indeed take music along a different route. Wagner’s more “scientific style” was an amalgam of the philosophical, the metaphysical, the dramatic and of course the musical, combining to create the most heady operatic brew experienced before or since.

Verdi appears to have been a reasonably decent human being, as well as an acute student of human nature who fully empathised with his characters. Wagner was a lousy human being who too studied human nature, although (with certain exceptions) he did not empathise with his characters. For me this makes Verdi a more humane artist; Wagner’s gift was to understand and reach towards the transcendent aspects of the human condition.

Roger Scruton, philosopher and writer on music

Wagner stands out among great composers as being also a great intellectual. He understood the modern world and its spiritual anguish, and provided modern people with the mythical narrative in which they could come to consciousness of their predicament. He was also the true inventor of modern harmony and one of the greatest masters of counterpoint in the history of music.

Yet of course, even at his greatest, he does not have the warmth and humanity of Verdi, which only goes to show that warmth and humanity aren’t everything. Wagner could not conceivably have composed a masterpiece like Otello, in which the extremes of passion achieve an entirely natural melodic flow; Verdi could not conceivably have composed a masterpiece like The Valkyrie, in which a profound metaphysical idea is made concrete, haunting and believable.

David Pountney, artistic director, Welsh National Opera

Verdi composed the drama of melody, melodrama, contrast. Wagner, that of ideas and transformation. Both were giants. Who else can join their club? Handel, Mozart, and Janacek.

Strauss and Puccini never transcended their supreme level of competence, both leaving the genre where they found it and sinking into decline. Verdi and Wagner each spent a lifetime pushing the boundaries of the form and their role within it, and were still redefining themselves till the very end.

Who may join them in the 21st century? George Benjamin has the talent, the taste and the skill. But as with Bizet, Berg, Debussy and Shostakovich, one masterpiece is not enough to join this exclusive club. He has another five operas to write...

Mark Elder, music director, Halle Orchestra

I couldn’t live without either of these two colossi. For me Verdi’s greatest gift is the humanity he poured into the essentially melodic style of his predecessors like Donizetti.

Every one of his operas has its own special tone and atmosphere, what Verdi called a tinta. It’s amazing to think he worked on Traviata and Il Trovatore at the same time, and yet each lives in its own unique world.

Wagner was born on the other side of the Alps, and that makes a profound difference. For me Wagner is one of the great symphonic composers of the 19th century, and it allows him to capture infinite fine shades of feeling, but on an epic scale. Whereas Verdi catches a feeling in one pithy phrase.

For a conductor they’re utterly different. Verdi is very physical – you get sweaty conducting his music – whereas Wagner needs small movements. Traviata is a three-shirt opera, Parsifal I can do in one.

Peter Konwitschny, director of productions, Leipzig Opera

Which is the greater composer? Neither. What distinguishes them is merely that one lived north of the Alps, the other South, and that’s a big difference. The German thinks with music, the Italian sings with it. Their works are highly political, and alongside their beauty, they address fundamental ethical messages to us.

Look at the endings of Aida and Tristan. They are so different and yet they both share the theme of a love which threatens society, and they suggest the same utopia: exiting from existence entirely. Does it make sense to claim that one is “deeper” than the other? Of course not. That’s the kind of undialectical idea you find in war songs and football chants. As for which I admire more, with the best will in the world I couldn’t say. They both enrich us and make us more human.

Peter Konwitschny’s production of Verdi’s La traviata for ENO opens on Feb 2

John Tomlinson, bass

Dramatically these two great composers seem very different to me. In Verdi there’s a certain simplicity and purity in each dramatic or emotional situation, each one following on from another.

Whereas with Wagner many things happen at the same time, which I love because it mirrors life’s complexity. Take Wotan’s farewell: it’s something like the complicated feelings a parent has when their child leaves home. One could be happy that they are going into life, but there’s a sadness that they are leaving home, and even resentment, because it’s another nail in one’s own coffin.

Compare that with a Verdi scene like Banquo’s aria in Macbeth, where everything is focused on fixing one emotional tone of heavy foreboding. It’s more pure in a way, and demands a very pure kind of singing.